Apartment List National Rent Report

Overview

Welcome to the May 2025 Apartment List National Rent Report. Our national rent index increased by 0.5 percent in April, marking the third consecutive month-over-month increase. Year-over-year growth remains negative at -0.3 percent, but is slowly inching back toward positive territory. In dollar terms, the national median monthly rent now stands at $1,392, up $7 per month compared to last month, but down $4 compared to April 2024.

Since the second half of 2022, rent prices have continued to ebb and flow with the seasons as they typically do, but with the overall trajectory trending modestly downward. Following a period of record-setting rent growth through 2021 and the first half of 2022, the national median rent has now fallen below its August 2022 peak by a total of 3.5 percent, or $50 per month. But despite the cooldown, the typical rent price remains 21 percent higher than its January 2021 level.

On the supply side of the rental market, our national vacancy index ticked up to 7 percent, setting a new record high in the history of that monthly data series, which goes back to the start of 2017. After a historic tightening in 2021, multifamily occupancy has been slowly but consistently easing for over three years amid an influx of new inventory. 2024 saw the most new apartment completions since the mid-1980s, and although we’re past the peak of new multifamily construction, this year is still expected to bring a robust level of new supply.

Zooming in to the local level, 83 of the nation’s 100 largest cities saw rents rise in April. On a year-over-year basis, rent growth is now positive for a slight majority of large cities (55 of the top 100). That said, we continue to see fairly steep year-over-year declines in the metros that have most rapidly expanded their multifamily inventory; these include Austin (-5.9 percent year-over-year), Denver (-4.7 percent), and Phoenix (-2.8 percent).

Rents are up 0.5% month-over-month, down 0.3% year-over-year

Rent growth follows a seasonal pattern – prices tend to go up during the spring and summer and dip during the fall and winter. We are now entering the time of year when demand tends to be ramping up to peak season activity. In keeping with that pattern, we saw the national median rent increase for the third straight month in April, however the pace of that increase slowed slightly compared to March. The national median rent increased by 0.5 percent in April, down from a 0.6 percent increase in March. Although the difference here is minor, it is nonetheless notable because we normally expect to see rent growth accelerating at this time of year rather than decelerating. This month’s reading may be the first indication of demand slowing due to declining consumer confidence amid a more uncertain macroeconomic outlook.

Despite this month’s slowdown, year-to-date rent growth in 2025 has so far come in slightly ahead of last year’s pace. This has caused year-over-year rent growth to gradually inch slightly closer to positive territory. Year-over-year growth nationally was stuck at -0.8 percent for most of last year, but it has been slowly ticking up over the past six months, and now stands at -0.3 percent. Prices are still trending down, but very modestly; the national median rent is just $4 per month cheaper than it was one year ago.

Year-over-year rent growth has been negative since June 2023, as an influx of new supply has resulted in softening prices. The national median rent is currently 3.5 percent – or $58 per month – below its mid-2022 peak. However, this dip has far from reversed the rapid rent increases of 2021 and 2022; despite the declines of the past two years, the median rent nationally remains 21 percent ($237 per month) higher than the January 2021 level. And with the supply wave now past its peak, it appears that the era of declining rents could be nearing its end.

Rent CPI remains elevated, but is no longer a blocker for the Fed

The primary measure of inflation in the United States is the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is heavily influenced by changes in housing prices. The Apartment List National Rent Index has proven to be a strong leading indicator of the CPI housing and rent components (collectively referred to as “shelter”), since our index captures price changes in new leases, which are only later reflected in price changes across all leases (what the CPI measures).

Because of these methodological differences, when our index peaked with record-setting rent growth in late 2021, the CPI’s measure of housing cost inflation was still in the early stages of its upswing. And while rent growth as measured by our index was cooling over the course of 2022, the CPI measure continued to rise. But as our index had predicted, the shelter component of CPI turned the corner in the spring of 2023 and has been steadily cooling off ever since.

Despite the progress, shelter CPI remains somewhat elevated and is one of the factors continuing to exert upward pressure on topline CPI. In fact, if you strip out shelter, the remainder of the CPI price basket has increased by just 1.5 percent year-over-year as of March, solidly below the Fed’s long-term inflation target. As shelter inflation continues to trend down, it will help improve the overall inflation picture, but it will still take time for shelter CPI to fully metabolize the shock to market rents.

However, the Fed understands that shelter CPI captures real-time changes in the housing market gradually and with a lengthy lag, and heightened shelter inflation has ceased to be a blocker to interest rate cuts. The Fed officially shifted course in late-2024, cutting interest rates three times, and additional cuts are expected in 2025. That said, tariffs and worsening consumer sentiment are now potentially complicating the picture for future interest rate cuts, and we’ll be continuing to keep a close eye on the official measures of housing inflation, even as elevated shelter CPI has become a less top-of-mind concern.

Multifamily vacancy rate hits 7%, a new peak

The rapid price fluctuations that have defined the rental market over the past three years are largely attributable to changes in the balance between the number of vacant apartments available (supply) and the number of renters looking to move into them (demand). Early in the pandemic, the Apartment List Vacancy Index rose to 6.8 percent as many Americans consolidated households and moved in with family amid rapid job losses and economic uncertainty. Then, a suddenly tight rental market drove skyrocketing rent growth in 2021 and 2022 as more households competed for a dwindling supply of vacant units. Our vacancy index tightened from 6.8 percent to 3.8 percent in just over a year.

But after bottoming out in October 2021, vacancies have been opening up steadily for over three full years. In April, our measure of the national multifamily vacancy rate ticked up again and now sits at 7 percent, representing a new all-time high for this data series, which goes back to the start of 2017.

The rising vacancy rate in recent years is largely attributable to a historic surge in multifamily construction. 2024 saw over 600 thousand new multifamily units hit the market, representing a 65 percent increase compared to 2022 and the most new supply in a single year since 1986. However, we are now past the peak of that supply wave – the number of multifamily units that completed construction in the first quarter of this year was down 30 percent from the 2024Q3 peak. That said, there remain 750 thousand multifamily units under construction, so even as the level of new supply hitting the market falls sharply from last year, it will continue to be robust by historic standards. As new apartment completions decline, the vacancy rate will likely begin to tighten again, but for now, we’re still seeing vacancies rise, even as rent declines gradually moderate.

Vacancy trends are highly localized, and they have been a key indicator of rapidly evolving conditions in local markets across the U.S. To explore the topic in greater detail, our monthly vacancy data are now available for download for hundreds of cities, metros, and states, and can be easily linked to our existing rent estimates using Federal Information Processing System (FIPS) codes.

List-to-Lease time comes down from all-time high

To close out 2024, the Apartment List Research team released our newest market indicator – the “time on market” index. This new data series reports the length of time it takes for vacant units to get leased after they are first listed as available on our platform. Time on market tracks with our existing rent and vacancy data series in intuitive ways. In addition to mirroring the seasonality of our rent index, time on market also exhibits clear trends that track longer macro cycles.

Amid hot market conditions when rents are rising quickly and vacancies are tight, units tend to rent quickly – this can be seen in the chart below as time on market dipped below 20 days in the summer of 2021. Conversely, when market conditions are cooler it tends to take longer for vacant units to get leased. Time on market peaked at 37 days in January, an all-time high going back to the start of the data series in 2019. But that time has been shortening in recent months, and among units that were leased in April, the median time on market was 30 days, down from 33 days in March.

The shortening of list-to-lease time that we’ve seen since the start of this year is in line with the seasonal return to positive month-over-month rent growth that we’ve observed in tandem. Units are currently sitting vacant for 1 day longer than they were at this time last year, but are still sitting for 10 days longer than they were in mid-2022 when the market was at its tightest. The influx of new supply has resulted not only in a growing number of vacant units, but also in an increase in the length of time those units remain unoccupied.

This new time on market data illuminates not just national trends, but regional ones as well. For instance, in Austin, TX – currently the nation’s softest rental market – units leased in April had been listed for a median of 41 days, 11 days longer than the national average. We now publish local “time on market” data for nearly 200 individual locations, spanning states, metros, counties, and cities, on our Data Download page for those interested in seeing how their market dynamics compare to the national trend.

Rents are up month-over-month in 83 of 100 largest cities, up year-over-year in 55

The chart below visualizes monthly rent changes in each of the nation’s 100 largest cities from January 2019 to present. The color in each cell represents the extent to which prices went up (red) or down (blue) in a given city in a given month. We see a typical seasonal pattern in 2019, followed by 2020, where horizontal bands of dark blue represent steep rent drops in some of the nation’s largest and most expensive cities. Meanwhile, the dark red bands in 2021 and 2022 represent the rent heatwave that drove up prices nationwide. But the right side of the chart shows the prolonged cooldown that has characterized the market since late 2022. In keeping with our national index’s return to positive rent growth, month-over-month rent growth was positive in April 2025 in 83 of the nation’s largest 100 cities.

Rents are also up in a slight majority of large cities on a year-over-year basis, with 55 of these cities logging positive annual rent growth. Last August, 73 of the nation’s 100 largest cities were posting year-over-year rent declines, but that number has been gradually falling, a trend consistent with our national rent index gradually inching up in recent months. Rent declines in major cities are still widespread, but they are no longer the norm. The fact that our national index is still logging negative year-over-year rent growth at a time when a majority of individual cities are seeing positive growth can be explained by the fact that a handful of major markets are still posting sizable declines, dragging down the national average.

New supply driving falling rents in Sun Belt markets while the Northeast, Midwest, and CA see prices trending up

Year-over-year rent declines have been concentrated in Sun Belt markets, as can be clearly seen in the metro-level map below. Austin has seen the nation’s sharpest decline among large metros, with prices there down 5.9 percent in the last 12 months. The Austin metro is also significant for permitting new homes at the fastest pace of any large metro in the country, indicating the impact of new supply on softening rents. Austin is not alone in exhibiting this trend. Among the ten metros with sharpest year-over-year rent declines, many also rank among the highest in terms of multifamily permitting activity (e.g. Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Jacksonville, San Antonio, and Dallas). Notably almost all of these markets are located in the Sun Belt.

At the other end of the spectrum, Fresno, CA currently has the nation’s fastest rent growth, with a 5.1 percent increase over the past year – the only large metro to see rents rise by more than 5 percent year-over-year. The San Francisco and San Jose metros also make the top 10, with both markets seeing year-over-year increases of more than 3 percent. Despite the recent strengthening of rent growth in the Bay Area, the region has been the slowest to bounce back from pandemic declines; in fact, we estimate that rents in the San Francisco metro are still 2 percent below their early-2020 level. The remainder of the top 10 is comprised primarily of markets across the Northeast (e.g. Providence, RI and Washington, DC) and Midwest (e.g. Chicago and Kansas City).

Tracking the L.A. rental market in the wildfire aftermath

This month’s report marks our third data release incorporating transactions taking place in the aftermath of the devastating wildfires that have upended lives across large swaths of Los Angeles. The fires are estimated to have destroyed nearly 12 thousand homes, causing a significant shock to the local housing market as those who have been displaced look for new homes. California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order prohibiting rent gouging as the city recovers, but with that cap set at 10 percent, the fires could still have a meaningful impact on rent prices in a market where metro-wide rent growth had previously been essentially flat.

Across the Los Angeles metro as a whole, we estimate that rents increased by 0.3 percent in April, and are up by 1.7 percent year-to-date. However, our city-level estimates show that the areas closest to the fires are seeing rents increase faster than that metro-wide average. For example, Pasadena, which was heavily impacted by the Eaton fire, has seen prices increase by 6 percent year-to-date. And in Santa Monica, which borders the Palisades fire, the median rent is up by 4.6 percent so far this year. These increases do not indicate evidence of widespread rent gouging, but they do seem to indicate that the trajectory of the area’s rent prices has been altered by the fires. Our team will be continuing to monitor this situation closely in the months ahead.

Conclusion

April’s 0.5 percent increase shows rent prices continuing to trend up, but with some signs of potential demand weakness heading into peak moving season. Year-over-year growth remains negative (-0.3 percent), but is slowly creeping closer to positive territory. And although we’re past the peak of the multifamily supply boom, our national vacancy index is still inching up, breaking 7 percent for the first time ever this month. As the level of new supply coming online continues to abate, we expect to see occupancy tighten and rent growth strengthen in the back half of this year, assuming that demand remains relatively stable. But amid a more uncertain macroeconomic outlook, stable demand is far from certain.

For more detailed data, see the table below, which contains the most recent estimates for the nation’s 100 largest cities. And for complete data, see our rental data download page, where you can download the full history of our monthly estimates going back to 2017 at various geographic levels (national, state, metro, county, and city). And as always, feel free to contact us with any questions.

A Note on Our Methodology

Apartment List has long been committed to making our data products as accurate and transparent as possible. Our rent estimates and vacancy index are calculated as follows:

Rent Estimates: We estimate rent growth using a same-unit approach that controls for compositional changes in the rental stock. We also control for price fluctuations that arise over the course of a vacancy by identifying the last available list price before a unit gets rented as a proxy for its transacted price. Finally, we combat luxury bias in our rent data by benchmarking our reported rent levels to fully-representative median rent statistics from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Vacancy Index: Our real-time availability data allows us to calculate a daily vacancy rate for each of our partner properties, which we then average over the course of each month to calculate a monthly rate. Our overall index is an average of these property-level vacancy rates, weighted by the number of units in each property. We restrict our sample to properties that have been on Apartment List for at least six months and that have attained a stabilized vacancy rate of 15% or less.

For those interested in getting deeper in the weeds, please see our rent estimate methodology and vacancy index methodology. And if you have any questions or custom data requests, you can reach us at research@apartmentlist.com.

For more context on local data, check out our market-specific rent reports for the following cities:

• Atlanta, GA
• Austin, TX
• Baltimore, MD
• Boston, MA
• Boulder, CO
• Charlotte, NC
• Chicago, IL
• Cleveland, OH
• Colorado Springs, CO
• Dallas, TX
• Denver, CO
• Detroit, MI
• Fort Collins, CO
• Fort Lauderdale, FL
• Houston, TX
• Indianapolis, IN
• Jacksonville, FL
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Minneapolis, MN
• Nashville, TN
• New Orleans, LA
• New York, NY
• Orlando, FL
• Phoenix, AZ
• Philadelphia, PA
• Raleigh, NC
• San Antonio, TX
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• San Jose, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Tallahassee, FL
• Tampa, FL
• Tucson, AZ
• Washington, DC

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About Apartment List Rent Reports:

Apartment List’s Rent Reports cover rental pricing data in major cities, their suburbs, and their neighborhoods. We provide valuable leading indicators of rental price trends, highlight data on top cities, and identify the key facts renters should know. As always, our goal is to provide price transparency to America’s 105 million renters to help them make the best possible decisions in choosing a place to call home. Apartment List publishes Rent Reports during the first calendar week of each month.